Melissa,
A filtered cursor is produced when you have only selected fields from a single table. If there are any calculated fields or if you include 2 tables then the result of a SQL-Select is always a 'real' cursor. As you found, the NOFILTER clause forces a separate cursor, preventing the filtered table result.

You can use the filtered table in any situation where you could use a table that has a filter applied with 'SET FILTER TO xxxxx' . IMHO, you should make a practice of adding NOFILTER to any SQL-Select that contains only 1 table. That way you'll never have a problem.

HTH
Barbara

>I come from the Fox2.x world and have only recently begun work with VFP. The problem with NOFILTER came up here Monday and it took me 30 minutes to track down what was happening (which incidently, the help file on SELECT-SQL was what pointed me to NOFILTER). I noticed a few things during my investigation and was hoping people could enlighten me on the way NOFILTER works and SELECT's workings in VFP now (is there any other difference I should be aware of).
>
>Things I noticed:
>1) The filtered cursor only seemed to be created when the where clause had an indexed element and you were selecting all, eg:
>Select * from Table Where LogicalFld into Cursor Temp
>
>2) You could still use that filtered cursor in append commands, eg:
>Select Temp
>lcDBF = DBF()
>Select Table2
>Append from &lcDBF
>
>Thanks for the help.